Last week in Indiana, Donald Trump saved a thousand jobs. You heard the story: Carrier, a heating and cooling company, had been planning to move some of its operations to Mexico.

Then the president-elect personally phoned the CEO of its parent company. Then Carrier announced that it would accept tax incentives from the state of Indiana in exchange for keeping some of the jobs—between and 1, of them, depending on who you ask —in the USA.

There are many reasons to be skeptical of this achievement. Bernie Sanders complained about the 1,plus jobs still moving to Mexico, and about the example the deal set: The jobs saved at Carrier are the plan.

All of these complaints have merit. Unfortunately, none of them matters.

The incident shows how keenly Trump understands the power of a concrete example. As a candidate, he promised to use his deal-making skills to improve the lot of the American worker. Now, nearly two months before he even takes the oath of office, he has delivered.

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Each critique of the Carrier deal requires the listener to hold in his or her head several levels of abstraction: And so each critique has less impact than the sturdy story: Of course, politicians have long used stunts and stories to connect with voters.

The stunts have typically been press opportunities meant to shape our perceptions of a candidate or leader. During the campaign, Michael Dukakis and his press secretary contrived to toss a baseball around on a piece of San Diego tarmac for an audience of 40 journalists, successfully pantomiming masculine regular-guyness for the press.

And it was Reagan, that master storyteller, who began the State of the Union practice of packing the balcony with anecdotes: Trevor, who helps the homeless, or Cindy, a teacher in a new program called AmeriCorps, or Josefina, whose life will be made better by tax cuts.

In these cases, the representative human is customarily trotted out as an example.

The idea is to take the abstract work of governing and make its effects real for the citizens watching at home. Trump is up to something different. Trump used his power as president-elect to intervene on behalf of a small group of individual Americans and claim victory. The resulting anecdote is the policy. The resulting press opportunity is the policy.

The approach collapses any distinction between the work of leadership and the promotion forex rate of iraqi dinar that work. It bypasses the abstractions of administration and substitutes visceral image-making instead.

What Trump has input type select jquery out here is a troubling blueprint for government by stunt. The Apprentice series premiere gathered a group of MBAs, copier salesmen, and leggy stockbrokers, split these contestants into two teams men vs.

The results make good television. The women use their sex appeal to move the product, doling out cheek-kisses and phone numbers along with paper cups of lukewarm liquid.

The viewer comes away with the idea that running a company entails performing well at a set of random, atomized, concrete tasks. Turn an empty storefront into a pop-up bridal boutique. Develop a new menu item for no gimmick work from home jobs chicken chain. Run a profitable pedicab operation for an afternoon. The approach is opportunistic rather than strategic, concerned with short-term victories rather than the unglamorous work of building something enduring and strong, anticipating and minimizing unintended consequences, understanding historical imperatives, and assessing the potential levers that can effect systemic change.

Just this weekend he tweeted that Americans can anticipate a 35 percent tax on goods imported by companies that outsource jobs, a plan that, whatever you think of its mercantilist merits and whatever its chances of getting through Congress, would at least be a policy applicable to all. No matter how engaged with policy Trump turns out to be, his 12 years of presenting business acumen as a series of memorable stunts will have a deep impact on the way he governs us.

The challenge is ISIS; the solution is bombs. The challenge is murderous, marauding immigrants; the solution is a wall. The challenge is a self-dealing Washington political elite; the solution is jail for Hillary. The challenge then for journalists is to become more than tart recappers of this unfolding show.

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Which will be more difficult than simply deciding to do so. He offers drama and conflict.

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He skips the policy crap and offers up compelling anecdotes all on his own, saving everyone the trouble of finding them for themselves. If journalists choose to ignore these easy narratives, they will stand uncontested, because Trump can deliver them to voters on his own. Journalists must instead set out to challenge these stories—by, say, following Carrier and its employees over the next four years, or by examining how the federal contracts for parent company United Technology Corp.

The rise of data journalism over the past decade—as a practice and a set of instincts—means that many journalists spent much of the campaign operating well above sea level, examining systems and patterns in the expanse of available facts: But the journalistic trend away from overreliance on anecdote remains fundamentally sound.

These attacks stuck because they framed the problems with Trump as sharply as Trump had framed the problems with America, and in both instances Trump was left fumbling for a response. The question is whether a press corps with strong instincts for analytic abstraction is best suited to a president who governs by anecdote. On Friday, after the Carrier hosannas had died down, Donald Trump put another company in his sights. Slate is published by The Slate Group, a Graham Holdings Company.

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